Pat Flannery wrote:
wrote:



Coupla things wrong here. The A-9/A-10 was *never* though of as a
"manned bomber," but as an unmanned ICBM.


There are existing WW II drawings of a manned A9 swept-wing version
showing cutaways of the interior; von Braun was pitching this to the
Luftwaffe as a a high altitude supersonic reconnaissance plane,

Actually... he was pitching that to the *United* *States* Air Force.
Exactly what role, if any, this had in wartime is at best uncertain. It
had no military equipment, nor room for any such. It was a go-fast
vehicel with a paylaod that consisted wholly of the pilot.

He was also talking about flying a pilot over the
Atlantic in 30 minutes, which is something the manned A-9 couldn't do,
so he must have been referring to some sort on manned derivitive of the
A9/A10.

Von Braun talked about a *lot* of things psot war that appear to be at
best massive exagerations, designed to make himself look more appealing
to the US Army while at Fort Bliss.


The biggest argument for a manned version of a A9/A10 is accuracy...

Wrong. There is no evidence whatsoever for a manned A9/A10 ICBM. There
was thought about using U-boats near the US coast for terminal
guidance.



the A9 is going to come down just about anywhere, which is strategically
worthless.

Which is the primary reason why the program was terminated.

Yet the project
stays active at a low level during the whole of WW II ...

Yes, the guys who initially worked on kept noodling with it. That was
about it. It's like a couple VentureStar engineers who keep talking
about it over lunch.

and suddenly gets
pushed forward at the very end, which means the high command thinks
there's some virtue in it.

In the last days the high command was insanely desperate.


As far as the jettisonable cover over the ramjet inlet, I've never seen
any info on this, but it's a good idea to decrease drag while doing
rocket flight in the stand-alone A-9 reconnaissance version, or protect
the ramjet from reentry heating in the A9/A10 version, so I wouldn't be
at all surprised if it was incorporated in the final design.

Except none of those "designs" existed until the 1990's, it appears.

It's
interesting to note that early on when they are doing the work on the A9
upper stage it uses the dart-type wing, but when they get around to the
A4b tests at the end of the war, it has swept wings.

The reason for this described elsewhere.


The "turbojet sustainer" on
the vehicle shown was a ramjet. This vehicle was meant to be a
single-stage research vehicle (think X-15).


It was pitched as a reconnaissance machine

No, it wasn't.